If he *does* have things that need real protection, he should move them off of the Win10 box immediately.
While it is certainly possible to play games with modest hardware requirements under a virt and still have acceptable performance, games with high hardware requirements running at high frame rates, at high resolutions, and maxed out display settings are going to run much more slowly under a virt than they will on Win10 running natively on the same hardware. Most people who spend the kind of money needed to buy such a system will not be satisfied with the performance provided by a virtual machine.
If the reasons for this are not obvious to you, take it as an opportunity to learn about how virtualization works.
Hi John,
I believe we are talking about two different things. I was referring to gaming in a VM not through the cloud. It doesn't seem like you actually watched either of the videos?
Here is another video showing 7 users on 1 CPU (ok dual CPUs but a single motherboard) gaming in VMs at near bare-metal performance (not through the cloud).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opX-AsJ5Uy8
Cloud based solutions may also be possible one day with caveats. Here is a video about that,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BQ4bXNdEQI
Like I wrote poor gaming performance in a VM is no longer true. You just need the correct hardware and setup to make it all work.
If anyone is interest in learning more the Level1tech forums are a great place to start. Search for IOMMU and GPU PCI passthrough. Be prepared to do lots of reading.
KVM is leading the pack for gaming in a VM running Windows 10.
Peace,
John
> I don't need a core sample of the moon to know that it isn't made of green cheese. Doesn't matter what the videos showed. There are lots of videos that "prove" and impossible claim. If you want to believe that, it's completely up to you.
>
> VMs have longer code paths than native. That alone would cause a perf hit. Then there is the noisy neighbor problem and the fact that dom0 has to cycle steal. Anyone with a lick of common sense would see the impossibility of such a claim.
You are correct their are some wacky videos out on the Internet. I wouldn't trust these videos if they didn't come from reliable sources, Level1techs are legit.
I will assume by longer code paths you are referring to the execution times. This is true however the path is roughly only a 5% longer to execute time penalty yielding 95% of the bare metal performance. Red Hat provides most of the speed boost with their virtio drivers. You can learn more here,
When we believe strongly about something we tend to have tunnel vision and can't see outside the box. I can only present that it works, I can not open your mind up to see outside the box nor do I want too. I respect your opinion and will hope you can do the same.
Anyway, this will be my last response unless I have something new to share. I freely give you the last word if you need it.
I hope you and family and everyone on this group have a very Happy New Year!
Peace!
Used to run Gentoo with qemu / kvm and was passing through 3 GPU's each running win10 for over a year. It took some time to setup and was a fun project to figure out things. There was no lag or crashes and Games were running smooth thanks to vfio! Of course bare Metal would be faster but Benchmarks tend to go from 3% to 5% lower ratting, nothing that worried me.
Guest the latest QSA answers this question somehwat lol.
Thank you for the reply.
I know Google (facebook, etc.) owns me. :( And most of the rest of us.
Anyway I moved on to Xubuntu. It provides enough security for my needs and the GPU pass through is working. Also there is a patch coming for QEMU that should bump the performance so I am satisfied with my setup. I'll continue to keep an eye on qubes hoping one day the PCI pass through catches up. I realize Qubes is way ahead on the security side though.
<snip>
> Do you run Qubes? On what hardware?
I wanted to use Qubes however I didn't feel that my usage case would be supported here so I opted for Xubuntu running QEMU and Virtual Machine Manager. I have it working, responding here from a VM. I've been following Qubes since version 1, just not using because of the many security features.
AMD Ryzen 2700X, 8 cores, 16 threads
32 GB ram
GeForce GT 1030 (desktop GPU)
Radeon RX 590 (gaming GPU, pass through, also working)
The gaming GPU is blocked in the kernel from the host OS (Xubuntu) with virtio. I suppose virtio could be a security risk. The host OS is restricted to 4 GB (hugepages) and one core (two threads). I have RAID 10 running on the host CPU. KVM shares the host memory however it has one core for itself for iothreads, etc. The rest is available for VMs. Neither of the two CPUs for the host and KVM have ever maxed usage for longer than half a second.
I was planning to use bcache to speed up the RAID although I may skip that since I am not feeling a need for speed. RAID 10 is plenty fast when the drives are not spun down. I have SMART monitoring setup too along with temp and fan monitoring. The host runs from an SSD. Next month I will add a backup solution.
I have some bloat in the host that I need to clean up. Overall it is a solid setup, certainly not as secure as Qubes. However I don't believe I would have this working with Qubes.
Just for information:
I have a gaming VM inside Qubes OS
It is a windows 7 HVM, with a dedicated GPU.
Performance are very good.
I referenced some useful links here https://neowutran.ovh/qubeos.pdf
Thank you for the information! I wish I had this 6 months ago when I began planning my personal VM server.